Around the world, nearly 5 billion internet users spend 7 hours a day online! (source) Those are impressive numbers and they’re growing. So, there must be money-making opportunities online – right? Yes!
But there’s a right way and a wrong way, so let’s see how online entrepreneurs monetize their blogs and thrive financially on the internet. This could be you…so read on for How to Make Money over the Internet…
1. What is Affiliate Marketing?
If you’ve never heard of Affiliate Marketing, this popular online marketing model is a low-cost start-up with a range of benefits.
It works by starting a blog, creating content, helping people, and promoting other companies’ products and services. You’re then paid a commission when your readers click through to the company and purchase.
Why is it Recommended for the Entrepreneur?
- It’s a great chance to use your experience and knowledge to earn a living helping others
- Geographically you’re free to work from home, the office, an Italian Village, or a tropical island!
- You don’t need a lot of money to start your business
- You don’t have to deal with products taking up every corner of your home
- You don’t have to deal with admin, customer service, or returns
I was hooked on the flexibility of running an online business with a laptop on a tropical island!
So let’s look at a very well-known company…
Affiliate Marketing Example: Amazon
Amazon is a great example of affiliate marketing. They run their affiliate program and lots of content creators promote and link to Amazon products.
Check out a food blog and you’re sure to see ingredient lists with products linked to Amazon.
The price of products on Amazon can range from 97c dental floss to a Tiny House worth $54,000! So your affiliate commission could vary depending on what people buy.
The good news is that if a reader clicks your affiliate link for say a book, you earn a commission for any sales that take place in the next 24 hours (hope they buy that Tiny House!)
2. How do I Start?
Affiliate Marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme and in fact, it’s a reasonably slow process. But you’ll create a successful business over time.
Don’t miss checking out the promotion tips below. It’s all about stickability, trusting in the process, and never giving up.
Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.
Bill Bradley
Steps for ‘How to Make Money Over the Internet’
- Set up a website/blog with WordPress
- Choose a niche topic you enjoy, e.g. pets, health, finance, personal development
- Decide who you want to target. Who’s your audience?
- Make sure there are Affiliate Programs that tie in with this topic and join them
- Create helpful content with keywords on this topic, e.g. ‘How to…’, ‘Top 10…’, ‘Best…’, ‘Ways to…’
- Add affiliate links to products and services
- Capture e-mails with free offers, for example, a free ebook
- Promote your blog and get traffic (lots of free and paid options)
- Make sales
Let’s look at the details now…
3. What’s your Niche?
What are your interests? What are you passionate about? To choose a niche find a subject you’re willing to research and write about for the months ahead. It has to be something you won’t get tired of.
Also, work out who you’re writing for. Who is your target audience? Over 50’s? Retirees? Mums? People interested in green energy? Women interested in yoga? People interested in surfing, People who have poodles…and on it goes…
So you become an expert in the niche and the particular people you’re targeting.
You give the best information on the topic, and answer the questions of who, what, where, why, and when. Then your audience are more likely to buy a product you recommend (through your affiliate link) because you’ve solved their problems…and they trust you.
Hot Niche Topics
- Renewable and Green Energy: Solar and Electric Cars
- Yoga
- Entertainment
- Crypto Currency
- Health and Fitness
- Personal Development
- Make money online
MORE NICHE HELP
- 31 Fitness Sub Niches for Women for a Profitable Blog
- 37 Health Micro Niches for a Thriving Blog
- 20 Lucrative & Unique Gardening Sub-Niches for Blogging
What’s Trending?
Also, check Google Trends to see what’s trending and check if your chosen niche has much interest. You can also check where this niche is trending, related queries, and related topics for writing ideas.
Here’s a search on Google Trends for Yoga
As you help people with your niche content, e.g. ‘Yoga for women ‘ you’ll then naturally link through to products that tie in with the content.
Related Rising Queries
Here are ideas for posts. For example, ‘Beyond Yoga Convertible Gym Bag Review’ or ‘What is Somatic Yoga’.
4. Help! I Can’t Write
You don’t have to be the world’s best writer, write conversationally as though you’re e-mailing a friend with the latest news. Your unique worldview is what makes your content…unique!
You’re also not limited to writing, you can create videos and podcasts. An excellent free promotional tool is to turn your blog posts into videos, reels, and shorts and share these on social media and YouTube.
But keep in mind that building your blog successfully is a process. Follow the process and you’ll succeed; research, stay motivated, set goals, create content, promote…So what’s next…
5. Join Affiliate Programs and Monetize
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to generate income online by promoting other companies’ products. You can sign up for programs directly with individual retailers. Or you can join affiliate networks that run affiliate programs for the retailers.
Essential Tips for Choosing Affiliate Programs
Commissions: This is the amount you earn for each sale you refer. Look for competitive commissions for the products you want to promote.
Retailer Rank/Popularity: Look for established and reputable retailers (merchants) with a good track record. Partner with popular brands and increase your chances of making sales.
Cookies: Choose longer cookie times, for example, 30 days. Cookies are tiny data files that track clicks on affiliate links to ensure you get credit for referred sales.
Think of these factors to help you choose high-quality affiliate programs that maximize your online earnings.
Affiliate Networks
- CJ – Vista Print and Weight Watchers are high up in the Network Earnings
- Clickbank – good for digital products (higher commissions)
- Flexoffers – one of the top 10 for revenue and performance
- Travelpayouts – Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, rental cars, flights, insurance, etc
- Shareasale – check out the top merchants by Power Rank. Seed Probiotics, Reebok, and Daily Harvest Plant Foods all have high power ranks.
Affiliate Marketing in Action
So Affiliate Marketing is a business model where you choose a niche topic, start a blog, and enjoy writing useful content.
It’s not salesy content “Buy these shoes now!” but rather you’ll tell a story or give the benefits of the product and show how they solve a problem.
For example “The hiking trail was very steep in places so I was glad I wore my Salomon X Ultra 3 GTX Hiking Shoes. They’re light but with plenty of cushioning and stability for vertical trails.” In this case, the name of the shoes will be a link to Amazon or an outdoor retailer with an affiliate program.
6. Keywords and SEO
Keywords are the foundation of niche blogging. These are the words, phrases, or questions that you’ll focus each article on. For example, ‘How to Brush Poodle Hair’.
These are the words that your reader is searching for. But you also need to narrow your research to keywords with low competition. By choosing these keywords your blog post ends up on page one of Google (Bing, etc) searches.
Keyword tools may give you keywords ideas, competition levels, search volume, popularity, difficulty scores, and long-tail keywords (3 or more words) to name a few of the factors.
Free Places to Find Keywords
- The Hoth Keyword Tool
- Soovle (see results from YouTube, Wikipedia, Bing, etc)
- AlsoAsked (get 100 results with competition)
- See what Google’s ‘People also Ask’ gives you
Keyword Research – An Example
You search for keywords on Google all the time (without realizing it!) So as an example let’s say you want to start a food blog with easy recipes for people who are tired after a long day at work and want easy, low-cost recipes.
So let’s search for “5 ingredient recipes”.
See we’ve found the problems (tired, no time, hungry or hangry!) and the solution – 5 ingredient recipes (quick, easy, low cost)
When I pop in 5 ingredient recipes in my browser window already I can see a list pop up with:
- 5 ingredient recipes Jamie Oliver
- 5 ingredient recipes dessert
- 5 ingredient recipes healthy
- 5 ingredient recipes vegetarian
- 5 ingredient recipes easy
- 5 ingredient recipes for dinner
- 5 ingredient recipes low carb
When I click through to Google I can see lots of websites and blogs targeting the initial keywords ‘5 ingredient recipes.’
Then at the end of page one, I can see other searches:
So there’s lots of keywords I can research if I want to start a blog on food. According to Authorityhacker Health and Fitness is a top niche you’re likely to make a lot of money.
So how about 5 ingredient recipes that focus on health?
7. Using Jaaxy to do Keyword Research
Once you have a list of keywords (potential posts) now you discover if they have low or high competition and the amount of traffic.
I use Jaaxy to search for these keyword stats, which is part of the Wealthy Affiliate platform. This is where I studied Affiliate Marketing and Niche Blogging.
Jaaxy offers keyword searches, the alphabet soup technique, search analysis, site rank, affiliate programs to match your keywords, and lots more.
See: The Jaaxy Keyword Tool for High-Performance Keywords
Keyword Search on Jaaxy
Here is the top results for ‘5 Ingredient Healthy Recipes’ with enough Traffic, Low Competition, and great SEO results.
A Rundown of These Results
- avg: the average number of searches that the keyword receives per month
- Traffic: visits to your website if you achieve first-page rankings in the search engines
- QSR Quoted Search Results: the number of competing websites ranked in Google for this exact keyword
- KQI keyword quality indicator: Green is great, Yellow is OK, Red is poor
- SEO: score based on traffic and competition, the higher the score, the more likely you will rank for this keyword on the first page (scale of 1-100, higher = better)
- Domains: availability of domains that are related to the keyword
Aim for these Keyword Results
- the keyword/s have to make sense grammatically
- the QSR should be under 100 (so not high competition)
- there has to be some traffic (the more the merrier!) but low traffic is fine
- Close to 100 for SEO and Green for KQI
Here’s what Top blogger Neil Patel says about Traffic
The key that you have to remember is you will get a lot more bang for your buck by targeting a large number of lower-traffic terms than by targeting a small number of higher-traffic terms.
Neil Patel
So have a Go at Keyword Research!
8. Create Content that Converts
Since you’re a freelancer you can write where and when you want! Write quality content that answers everything the reader wants to know.
Put your keywords in your Blog Post Title, in the first paragraph, in the conclusion and naturally through the post.
Tips for Posts
- 1000 – 2,500 words long – answer questions, give tips, guides, and reviews
- 3000+ posts, for example, Epic Guide to… Ultimate Guide to
- Create scannable content
- Headings, H1, H2, H3
- Small paragraphs
- Add images and videos
- Lists
- Add keywords in the meta-description and alt-images
9. Adding Affiliate Links
As you build out your content you can then add affiliate links from the affiliate programs and networks you’ve joined.
Your affiliate links contain a unique code that identifies you as the referring affiliate. When a reader clicks on the link they are taken to the merchant’s (company’s) website to purchase the product or service.
You then receive a commission from this purchase – Yippee!
I use the WordPress Plugin Pretty Links to track my affiliate links where I can cloak and track my links. So I can see identify top performing links and ones that are failing.
See: Pretty Links Review for Affiliate Marketing Success.
10. Promote like Crazy
This is the part you don’t want to miss out on. Promoting your blog brings oodles more traffic to your site, which means more clicks, which potentially means more money. Choose your channels and promote promote promote…
Free Promotion Ideas
Quora: You’ll find thousands of questions you can answer on Quora. Like the content on your blog, be authentic, and be super helpful.
The first time I answered a question on Quora I described a personal experience about my blogging beginnings. The next day my answer was shared with a Search Engine Optimization group! I was super chuffed!
Make sure your credential ties in with the answer, e.g. if I’m answering questions about blogging my credential is: Guide to Blogging Success. webworkfromanywhere.com
Some of your answers can have hyperlinks back to your blog (that’s a highlighted word within the answer that’s a link to your blog).
I searched Quora for 5 Ingredient Healthy Recipes and look what came up. Not only a good question to answer on Quora but a great idea for a blog post:
What’s the most delicious and healthy green smoothie recipe requiring only 5 ingredients or less?
Pinterest is more than social media – it’s a search engine – so harness the power of Pinterest by creating pins for your Boards. Aim for around 6-12 pins per day but don’t link to the same URL on your website more than once every 7 days.
Pinterest is good for food, interior design, crafting, travel, beauty, gardening, art, entertainment, and fashion.
Other free promotion vehicles include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.
Facebook paid ads are also a good low-cost way to direct very targeted traffic to a landing page and your newsletter sign-up.
Here’s the Niche Blog Process in a Nutshell
- Your posts answer people’s questions, e.g. reviews of products, recommended lists, ‘how to’…articles
- Minimum 1000 words, some 3000+ articles too
- Write and publish content regularly
- Google likes consistency so publish at least 3 times a week
- Promote the posts on free and paid platforms
Wrapping Up – How to Make Money Over the Internet
In the long run, find a niche that resonates with you. Work out your audience’s pain points are in this niche, and what they need help with.
Work out your blogging strategy, and find the online spaces where you can successfully promote your blog, and where your readers spend their time.
Stay motivated, set your goals and you’re on your way to financial freedom.
P.S. Hi Friends – I hope this post ‘How to Make Money Over the Internet’ has benefited you and you’ve gained some insights.
Feel free to share your own ideas and if you have any questions, pop them in the comments below. I will get back to you ASAP.
Check out my latest value-packed posts about niche research and affiliate marketing to help your business progress. Please share if you think this will help your friends and networks.
Determined to help you succeed, Alisa
